Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821) by Jonathan Lethem Page A

faltered, unsure of his question. “How long are you going to leave him in there?”
    The two could barely be bothered to hesitate, in their hurry for the shelter of the truck’s cab. “We’re on installation and delivery,” the clean-shaven one said as he assumed the driver’s seat. “Pickup’s another department.”
    “Are we talking hours or days or weeks?” Stevick said, locating, perhaps belatedly, some faint civic courage, a notion that he’d absorbed certain duties as a local witness to the open-air procedure, perhaps by default, but no less legitimately for that. Besides, others inside the café might be watching through the window. His question was perhaps a feeble one, but for anyone observing, the fact that he’d stood up from the bench and begun some sort of stalling interrogation could be seen as crucial, either in a deeper intervention to be conducted by more effectiveor informed members of the community or in some later accounting of Stevick’s comportment and behavior.
    “I really didn’t look at the schedule in this case,” the driver said. “But they’re rarely installed for more than three or four days in a single location.”
    “Anything longer wouldn’t be seen as humane, I suppose?”
    “More like these measures simply aren’t effective beyond a certain point. Listen, we’ve got to go.”
    “Those boards are in no way tight enough to keep the rain from falling on him,” Stevick pointed out. By placing their hole so near the hydrant, they’d prevented a parked car from giving shelter to the hole. On the other hand, perhaps they’d spared the hole’s inhabitant something terrifying in being doubly pinned by the low ceiling of a vehicle’s undercarriage. Probably Stevick was guilty of overthinking: It was impossible to find a parking space in this neighborhood, so they’d settled on the obvious solution.
    “That’s generous of you to notice, citizen,” the driver said. He gestured to the occupant of the passenger seat, the goateed man, who’d been sitting with his arms crossed and rolling his eyes, miming impatience. Now this silent partner produced something from the floor of the truck’s cab: a compact black umbrella—the inexpensive double-hinged kind you might purchase at a shoe-repair shop, having ducked in during a gale. He handed it to the driver, who passed it through the open window to Stevick. “This is why we’re grateful you came along when you did,” thedriver said, nodding to indicate the hole. “Don’t be afraid to stand on top—it’ll easily support your weight.”
    With that they were gone, and for the last time. Stevick never saw them again; the driver hadn’t been misleading him when he alluded to the narrow specialization of their tasks. Now there was only the hole, its occupant, and Stevick, with his own duties. For, when freed by the truck’s departure he turned to face the café, no one in fact was regarding him from the window, now streaked with rain and curtained by a dripping overhang. Stevick opened the umbrella. The hole was silent. Stevick could easily have gone home, but instead he stepped over, tested the soundness of the footing on top—there was little doubt, he’d watched them work—and sheltered both himself and the sturdy boards from the rain as well as he could beneath the feeble rigging of black cloth and wire.
    In a lull the aproned counterman stepped outside the café’s doors for a cigarette break. He nodded curtly at Stevick, exhaled smoke rising into the rain. “So you’re in charge now, huh?” he said.
    “I didn’t want to leave him completely alone.” There had been no sound, barely a detectable motion from the hole beneath his feet, where the captive now sat braced, knees wedged in dirt. “I wouldn’t say I’m in charge in any wider sense,” Stevick continued. “I’m something of a stopgap or placeholder, really.”
    “I more than understand,” the café employee said. “We’re in a similar